Oregon Adventures: Journey to Crater Lake: Day 3

Hello Hiveians! Welcome back!

Today we're picking up where we left off last time. We had just arrived at Crater Lake, set up camp, and it was my first night sleeping in a hammock in below freezing temps, so let's get to it!

I had a thermal pad, a heavy duty sleeping bag, an extra blanket, and about 4 layers of clothes on. I could barely move in my hammock, but I was decently warm. I had to pull the mummy head thing up over my head to keep warm later in the night. But all in all, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though I don't look forward to doing cold weather hammocking again anytime soon.

So we woke up the next morning and it was cloudy but calm where we were, but weather on top the lake seemed much worse. We had gotten up for sunrise, and headed up even though the weather didn't look good, and it wasn't. It was a near white out up top, a mini blizzard almost. We were trying to decide what to do, as this was our only morning here, and sunrise didn't look like it was going to happen. We decided we'd get breakfast and wait to see what happened.

We headed up to the lodge at the top of the lake, but they told us breakfast is only available for lodge guests, so we had to find somewhere else. We looked around on google and found a place about 30 minutes away and that was the closest we had, so we headed there.
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It was a quaint little area off the road, it reminded me of the cartoon show Gravity Falls. We couldn't go inside, so we had to eat our breakfast to go outside, which wasn't as nice. After I had my pancakes, we took a little drive to get some gas and found a pretty cool spot along the way. It was an old volcanic gorge, originally cut from the ancient lava flows!
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And here you can even see one of the ancient lava tubes near the top, the dark hole, is where lava used to stream out of!

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So after that little detour, we began heading back to Crater Lake to see if the weather had cleared up a bit. On our way there, we started discussing possibly changing our plans. Instead of staying just 1 night, we talked about staying another night at Crater Lake, since the next day weather looked really good, and we didn't get sunrise today. We agreed, we should stay another night. So we diverted, and headed to another waterfall we wanted to hit and chose to do that today, instead of the next day.

I had been looking forward to this waterfall a lot, it was very similar to another amazing waterfall we visited a few years back. The only thing we did know was, a lot of the very cool angles and shots we saw of the falls, was from a vantage point you had to hike down to, on a very steep unofficial trail. Which really sucked. I was just about ready to do it, but it looked really sketchy, and didn't feel it was worth the risk. So we just shot from platform and got what we could.

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So while it was a bit underwhelming due to the only angles we could get, it was still a very beautiful waterfall, and I'll have to go back sometime with the intentions of hiking down!

After that, we headed back to Crater Lake. We stopped in the center first and extended our booking for that night, then headed up to the lake and a bit clearer weather than the snowy morning we had.

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After seeing decent visibility, we decided we'd drive the entire rim and see what we could get!

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After getting about half way round the rim, we did a few portraits, because you know, gotta show that you were there, right? Right? Plus, humans add a great sense of scale too.

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So yeah, that's how we ended the day. Wasn't the most exciting day, due to weather and changing up our schedule trying to make time for things like sunrise, but that's traveling, things don't always go to plan. Oh yeah, the breakfast place went to, the guy said "It hasn't rained since January, we needed this." and while I'm glad they got much needed rain, it goes to show just how unlcky my timing was :(

Now this day was over, it was time to head back to camp and bunker down for another even colder night than before. Fantastic. Check back for the next installment to see how that went. What your favorite photos from this one? The waterfall? The portraits? Also, what's the coldest you've ever camped out in?

In the meantime, you can see more of my work at www.SeanGold.com or on Instagram at @SeanGoldPhotos.

Til next time,

Sean

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